Is Winning Newspaper Endorsements Worth a Candidate’s Effort?

By Peter Brown

Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, is a former White House correspondent with two decades of experience covering Washington government and politics. Click here for Mr. Brown’s full bio.

During his successful campaign for the Republican nomination for Florida governor, Rick Scott decided it wasn’t worth his time to sit down with the editorial boards of newspapers around the state as they decided whom to endorse.

The expectation is that Mr. Scott, a former health care executive who won the GOP nomination over Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum with virtually no newspaper endorsements, won’t bother to meet with the editorial boards in search of their backing for the November election, either.

Bad-mouthing the news media has been a tried-and-true tactic for political candidates since printing began, but ignoring them altogether is a potentially new step in the evolution of American politics.

The operative question is whether such a strategy makes sense in these days of 24/7 news cycles, cable television and the Internet, when voters get their information from a variety of sources and to a much lesser degree from the traditional news media, especially newspapers.

Will other candidates decide, too, that meeting with the folks who decide newspaper endorsements isn’t worth their time or trouble?

A Complicated Answer

The answer is complicated and depends to a degree on whether the candidate is a Democrat or Republican, a political outsider or a member of the establishment.

But in an era when trust of the news media is close to all-time lows and readership has fallen like a rock, most of the newspapers that have survived are shells of their former selves when it comes to clout in their communities and their financial health.

The papers’ economics matter because newspapers that are worried about their existence are more likely to be wary of alienating any potential readers.

Once upon a time, newspaper endorsements were a big deal to candidates for higher office because there was a belief that the news media were a good proxy for the peoples’ views and values.

But today, that arguably is no longer the case. A Wall Street Journal-NBC poll this month found that only 13% of voters had a “great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in the national news media, less than the portion who had confidence in the federal government, the auto industry or the energy industry, and only four percentage points better than the 9% who felt that way about Congress.

Fading Confidence

The first time WSJ-NBC asked the question, in July 2002, 27% felt that way. Studies by other polling organizations in previous decades showed confidence in the news media even higher.

As a White House reporter in 1984 for Scripps Howard newspapers, I sat in while President Ronald Reagan spent an hour with the editors of the medium-sized chain’s papers in search of their endorsement. Such a use of a candidate’s time – much less that of an incumbent – would be unthinkable these days.

In recent years, some newspapers have dropped the practice of endorsing candidates, but most continue it. Most candidates, at least for statewide and local office, go through the formality of sitting for an interview even if they suspect they won’t be getting the nod.

For Mr. Scott, running his campaign against the establishment in the primary meant taking on Mr. McCollum and the state Republican hierarchy. It also meant implicitly treating the news media as part of the state government establishment.

He made himself less available to reporters than candidates typically do and used his personal fortune to go over their heads to contact voters directly through seemingly unceasing television commercials and mailings.

Perceived Bias: A Political Plus

Mr. Scott is certainly not the first candidate to try to go over the news media’s heads on the assumption that coverage from newspapers and TV stations was more likely than not to be unfavorable.

Whether true or not, most Republican candidates and political operatives see the news media as biased against them. But since Republicans and conservatives have a lower opinion of the news media than Democrats and liberals, perceived bias can be turned into a political plus.

Simply put, running against the news media in a Republican primary often can be a winning tactic because GOP voters often see journalists as the enemy. That has been less the case in general elections, however. Democrats and swing voters often are more receptive to influence by factors like newspaper endorsements.

Few candidates, Republicans or Democrats, have been willing to pick a fight with newspaper editorial boards by telling them they are not worth the time or trouble to court.

Mr. Scott’s likely tactics will make for an interesting test case.

It’s worth noting that television stations do not endorse candidates. If they did, it would be a very brave candidate who chose to ignore them.

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Capital Journal is WSJ.com’s unique site for analysis of the political and policy maneuvering in Washington in the era of Barack Obama. It features the Capital Journal columns and occasional other postings by executive Washington editor Gerald F. Seib, and will house Political Wisdom, the Journal’s daily aggregation of the smartest political analysis from around the Internet. Also look for regular columns by Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute and occasional contributions from others.